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NightlyPoe said:
Torillian said:

The psychiatric community appears to think so. I tend to defer to the experts where possible. I haven't spent years studying child psychology so I assume they know more about it than I do. Hopefully if a psychiatrist had a question on bioinorganic chemistry they would afford me the same respect.

The problem is that the psychiatric community is being highly politicized on this subject.  It seems that anything mildly contradictory of the "right" answer on the subject the science is silenced.  We went through the same thing a few decades back when gender roles were marked as completely behavioral because that's where the political winds were blowing back then.  And we found plenty of examples of tragedy emanating from that bit of group think.

I would mark this as a blight on psychology and science in general.  I do not trust them on the subject and find their opinions of little use.

To answer the original poster, yes I believe this is child abuse.  A three-year-old is not capable of making such a life-altering decision and the gender confusion created by parents and psychologists and teachers pretending with an undeveloped mind that doesn't know the difference between real and imagined is just terrible.

My personal view on the trans subject in general is that the common view is misguided.  We should call everyone what they biologically are.  A man can live the socially constructed norms of a woman if he so chooses, but that man also needs to come to grips with what he is, NOT WHAT HE WANTS TO BE.  There's an old psychology story that fits here.  A school was having trouble and decided that they should improve the students' self-esteem.  They praised the students no matter how poor their work.  The idea was that the kids would feel better about themselves and get better grades (self-esteem actually has little to do with success, but that's another matter).  Instead, all they did was increase the number of fights in the school.  See, the dumb students remained dumb, but they were being told otherwise.  It wasn't new that these students were having difficulty in school, but it was new that they were being praised.  There was a conflict where they wanted to keep pretending they were smart, but knew that it wasn't true.  When someone pierce the fantasy, they either went away feeling bad about themselves, or fought to keep their self-esteem up.  In the end, nothing good came of the program.

Everyone pretending that a person is something that they're not doesn't help anyone.  Including the person who we are humoring.  Because there will always be plenty of people who will not accept the fantasy and will say the truth.  We know that trans people are particularly hurt by this.  Well, that's because, like in the example above, they know the truth.  No matter how much social pressure there is, there is no getting around the truth.

E pur si muove (And yet it moves)

If it weren't the truth, then the person would be able to shrug it off.  You can call me a woman all day long, it wouldn't do much more than make me look at you funny.  I'll go home completely unconflicted.  The source of the pain is the loss of the breaking of the fantasy.  We need to help trans people deal with what they are.  Only then will they be able to live healthy lives.  Playing pretend for a lifetime just keeps people running into the same walls as reality keeps intruding.

Yikes.  All sorts of yikes.  People are committing suicide over their sexuality and you reduce it to humoring them.  WTF.



A warrior keeps death on the mind from the moment of their first breath to the moment of their last.